The Lost Continent
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Men of the people: Leftists often get lumped together, but they represent vastly different groups.
The Many Lefts of Latin America
Latin America’s leftists are anything but united.
By Javier Corrales
F
or half a decade now, the headlines from
Latin America have touted the rise of the
Latin left. As leftists have moved off the streets
and into government in Bolivia, Brazil,
Venezuela, and elsewhere, however, the story
line has changed. The vision of a united leftist coalition of Latin nations opposing the
United States and free market reforms is an
illusion. Instead, intense fights have broken out
within the left as protest movements struggle
to govern. The Latin American “left,” it is now
clear, actually comprises a wide range of
movements with often conflicting goals.
The Revolutionaries: These are the old radicals who have not changed much since the
1960s. They share an angry romanticism
and a strong dislike of markets and institutions. “¡Qué se vayan todos!”—“Let’s get
rid of everyone”—is their slogan, and it
became a refrain during the 1999
Constitutional Assembly in Venezuela, the
2001 financial crisis in Argentina, and the
2003 street protests in Bolivia.
The Protectionists: Many business owners
and union leaders in Latin America support
Javier Corrales is associate professor of
political science at Amherst College.
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Foreign Policy
tariffs and protection against cheap imports
from abroad. They can be found in industries
such as auto parts, light manufacturing, toy
and apparel producers, and financial services. This camp lost a lot of ground with the
reforms of the 1990s and is desperate to
regain control of economic affairs. Their slogan is “No to the Free Trade Area of the
Americas.”
The Hypernationalists: Latin America’s
unexpected alignment with the United States
during the 1990s on trade and drug policy
alarmed this group. Inheritors of the “Yankee
Go Home” mentality, the hypernationalists
pervade the region’s universities, and parts of
the media, the military, and the middle classes. They deplore U.S. foreign policy since
9/11, believe that U.S. drug enforcement
efforts do more harm than good, and consider the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a
tool of the White House. Ironically, they also
dislike the growing obstacles to getting a visa
to visit the United States.
The Crusaders: These are loosely organized citizen groups, such as Alianza Cívica
in Mexico, who want greater transparency
in government, more public participation in
budget decisions, less corruption, and
functioning courts. Crusaders gained
strength in the 1990s and gravitated
toward the left, but they have weaker
ideological moorings than other groups.
The Big Spenders: These are groups including teachers’ unions and government contractors who want to invest more in social
services and old-fashioned statist projects
such as infrastructure and energy development. Tired of more than two decades of
budget controls, the big spenders have had
enough. They’re not inherently anti-market,
but they reject the tight fiscal policies of the
past two decades, which they blame on the
IMF and bond traders.
The Egalitarians: A hybrid of the revolutionaries and the big spenders, the egalitarians advocate blunt redistributive policies
to help the poor. Their slogan is, “For the
good of all, the poor first,” which was
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidential campaign slogan in Mexico.
The Multiculturalists: They want to end
the system of ethnic apartheid prevailing in
parts of Latin America, especially in the
Andes, where long-neglected ethnic groups
still lack political representation. The victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia—the first time
an indigenous candidate won the presidency—was a high point.
The Macho-bashers: This more recent
trend in the Latin American left started in
the late 1980s with the effort to grant
DAVID MERCADO/REUTERS
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women more political and civil powers.
They are now beginning to think about
how to make these macho societies a
bit more gay friendly. The impulse to
empower women has made impressive
strides, culminating with the groundbreaking election of Michelle Bachelet in
Chile, who campaigned on a platform of
“gender parity.” As for efforts to make
Latin American society less machista,
that may take decades.
The revolutionaries, the protectionists, and
to some extent, the hypernationalists and
egalitarians are the most determined enemies of market reform. Marketoriented politicians will have little success
cracking their ranks. The other groups,
however, have more confused loyalties and
represent demands that could be met while
pursuing market reforms.
If the left is to remain in power, it
must prevent groups like the egalitarians
from peeling away from the movement.
And that means the left will have to grow
up. A protest movement can accommodate
almost any grievance. A functioning government cannot. As rulers, the left will not
avoid the wrenching process of prioritization. That could lead to political maturity.
But the infighting might also lead to economic and political disaster, as happened
in Ecuador under Lucio Gutiérrez, in
Argentina under Fernando de la Rúa, and
very nearly in Brazil under Luiz Inácio
“Lula” da Silva.
High commodity prices have improved
the economic situation and made governing easier, but the day of reckoning will
come for these leftist coalitions. Compromise with market forces and the various
leftist currents will be essential. Radicals
have gone the farthest in Venezuela, and
this has produced a degree of polarization
unseen in the region since the Sandinistas
governed Nicaragua in the 1980s. No other
government will want to take that perilous
route. How successful the inevitable
process of adjusting to power will be
depends on which left wins out.
But the electoral defeat of candidates running on platforms perceived
to be too extreme or too close to Chávez does not mean that the ideas they
represent are unappealing. Latin American voters are aggrieved, impatient,
and eager to vote for new candidates who offer a break with the past and
who promise a way out of the dire present.
I F N O T L E F T, T H E N W H E R E ?
Since the late 1990s, Latin American political systems have been rocked
by a wide variety of frustrations. Therefore lumping the different types
of discontent under generic “leftist” or “populist” monikers is misleading. Indeed, in today’s Latin America, some of the grievances are
clearly anti-market, while others are rooted in dissatisfactions caused
not by overreliance on the market but by governmental overreach. Curbing corruption, for example, is a strong political demand that is unlikely to be satisfied by increasing the economic activities controlled by an
already overwhelmed and corrupt public sector. Other grievances unite
the far left and the far right. Economic nationalists who resent the
market-opening reforms that allow foreign products to displace locally made ones include both right-wing business groups who profited handsomely from the protectionism, as well as leftist labor leaders who
have seen their ranks shrink as local factories went out of business, unable
to compete with foreign imports.
The responses to these political demands have also been varied.
Some leaders, like Chávez and Kirchner, are behaving in a traditional,
populist fashion, relying on massive and often wasteful public spending, on prices kept artificially low through governmental controls, or
the scapegoating of the private sector to cement their popularity. Many
others, however, like Lula in Brazil, Vicente Fox in Mexico, Alvaro Uribe
in Colombia, or Ricardo Lagos in Chile have been models of more
responsible economic governance and have shown a willingness to
absorb the costs of unpopular but necessary economic policies.
What unites almost all Latin American countries, however, are
two long-standing trends that multiply and deepen the variety of the
grievances that are sprouting throughout the region: Prolonged mediocre
economic performance, and the decay of traditional forms of political
organization, and political parties in particular.
Latin America has suffered from slow economic growth for more than
a quarter-century. Episodes of rapid growth have been short lived and
often ended in painful financial crashes with devastating effects on the
poor and the middle class. Economic growth in Latin America has been
slower than it was in the 1960s and 70s, worse relative to all other emerging markets in the world, and unremittingly less than what the region itself
needs to lift the poor standard of living of most of the population. This
economic disappointment has become increasingly unacceptable to voters who have been promised much and gotten little and who have
become better informed than ever about the standards of living of others at home and abroad. Latin Americans are fed up. Naturally, the frustrations produced by the wide gap between expectations and reality and
between the living standards of the few who have so much and the many
who have almost nothing create fertile ground for the fractious politics that make governing so difficult. Inevitably, political parties, and
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| December
2006
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